eBook-speaker

Read eBooks with Linux using a speech-synthesizer
©2019 J. Lemmens

Description

eBook-speaker reads an eBook and uses a speech synthisizer for output.
eBook-speaker reads the EPUB format. If the given file is not an EPUB it will be converted using several tools like calibre, lowriter, pandoc, pdftotext, scanimage, pnmflip, unrtf or tesseract. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_e-book_formats)
eBook-speaker can use any TTS (Text-To_speech) tool, as long as the TTS can read the text from a file and writes the audio to a .wav file.
The file ~/.eBook-speaker.xml contains TTS tools to use.

Requirements

Be sure the following extra packages exist on your system:

libncursesw5
libmagic1
libpulse0
libxml2
libsox2
libsox-fmt-mp3
libsox-fmt-pulse
unar
txt2man
man2html-base
html2text
gettext
espeak
libreoffice-writer
calibre
pandoc
poppler-utils
ghostscript
tesseract-ocr
sane-utils
netpbm
unrtf
wget

The following packages are needed to make the manual and the html document:

txt2man
man2html

Usage

As a mortal user, give on the command line,:

$ ebook-speaker

A file-manager will appear from which an input-file can be selected. An input-file can also be given as argument to eBook-speaker:

$ ebook-speaker file.epub

This starts reading the eBook and printing the content on the screen. After giving an [ENTER], the eBook will be read using the espeak speech synthisizer. One can select another TTS using the 't’command.

A list of items on the eBook will appear. Press <ENTER> to start playing. When reading of an item has finished, eBook-speaker will play the next item and the cursor will automatically skip to that item, so that your braille-terminal will display the name of that item.

For keyboard navigation, plese press 'h' or '?'.

eBook-speaker is multilingual. The following languages are currently supported:
bulgarian, dutch, english, finnish, french, german, portuguese, Serbian, spanish.

Enjoy

Jos Lemmens

Note

From his brother Kees on November 9, 2021 : I am very sorry to inform you that Jos quietly passed away this morning. He will be remembered as our own dear, clever, little "Stephen Hawking".

On behalf of users of eBook-speaker and Daisy-player, current mainteners would also thank him for his tremendous work. Jos, we miss you.